


brother, I am fire, surging under the ocean floor

by gemstonecircles



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Brief discussions of faith, Duo is Worried, F/M, FT what FT, Heero is a Mess, Howard is the only one who is adjusting, Sally Ex Machina, TW: Hospitals, TW: Violence, brief mention of noin/zechs, compulsively thinking about soap, directly pre- and post- EW, duo + heero friendship, entirely too much soap, lapsed Catholic Duo, mainly its just soap and soda, no beta we die like men, non-sexual nudity, tw: trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-20 09:01:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30002484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemstonecircles/pseuds/gemstonecircles
Summary: When he finally headed off down the road to the shuttle port, dingy backpack slung over his shoulder, Hilde came to wrap an arm around Duo’s waist as they watched him walk away.“Your friend,” Hilde said mildly, “is really weird.”All Duo could do was shake his head, “Babe, you have no idea.”
Relationships: Duo Maxwell/Hilde Schbeiker, Relena Peacecraft/Heero Yuy
Comments: 9
Kudos: 18





	brother, I am fire, surging under the ocean floor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cookami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookami/gifts).



It was the soap that was the beginning, and the end, of his concern. 

Duo had become aware, in the slow, numb, grey weeks and months that followed the end of the war, that each of them would deal with the change in different ways. The shift from martial to civil life was maddening, tectonic, indescribable. Where did the soldier end and the boy begin and where did the emerging man start to make his slow, painful push through? 

It was easier, he reflected, for those of them with a touchstone, a connection. Quatre had his family, and, more importantly, his found family, knowing that Rashid and the others would be with him no matter the difficulty. Trowa had Cathy, and, in some way, the adrenaline rush of dangerous performances and the physical training that allowed him to stay with the circus helped to smooth off some of the rough edges that always broke through, like shrapnel making its way to the surface of the skin in an old wound. Wufei had always been a cipher, and Duo wasn’t the one to try reading him.

Duo had Hilde, and Howard, and, although he was loathe to admit it, the tattered vestiges of faith, whatever that meant. There had been one night, one bitter, cold, and rainy night when he couldn’t stop thinking and thinking and _thinking_ and ended up walking through the city, taking turns without reason, drenched and angry and hurt. He had walked until the fingers of dawn began curling their way through the gaps in the buildings when he found himself in front of the church, and thought, well, to hell with it.

His confession lasted over two hours and the priest, a middle-aged but already silver-haired man with ragged facial scars and kind, sad eyes, had sat through every detail of every horror, every crime, every death. Duo had screamed. He sobbed. He laughed hysterically and inappropriately and then sobbed some more. At the end, he was hiccupping and exhausted, but after his absolution, he felt nebulous, euphoric, almost drunk. As he turned to leave, the priest called after him, gently.

“My son,” he said, “You care deeply about the things you have done. But do not let the things that have been done to you fester. You need to let yourself heal. Show mercy also to yourself.”

Duo had paused, rapping his knuckles against the edge of a pew. 

“I’ll think about it. Thanks.”

* * *

Duo had found that sorting and scavenging gave him a certain focus, a way to turn off the running thoughts and just _be_. That the satisfaction of finding unexpected treasures was addictive. The search for something special, the sorting, the _rhythm_ helped him turn off the memories and start to just…exist.

Hilde was also addictive. She made him feel normal and fun and funny, funny in a way that was less _these-will-be-dope-last-words_ , and more that stomach-flip of _I-made-her-snort-out-her-soda_ satisfaction. He liked that she understood, a bit, what it was like, but hadn’t been there for all of it, hadn’t _seen_ all of it. Hadn’t seen all of him. 

He worked with her in the junkyard during the day, then, as the sweep of orbit triggered the artificial twilight, they would order Protein Burgers or Teriyaki Bowls from the smattering of greasy fast food chains near the junkyard. Some days, Hilde would tell him goodbye with a giggle and a quick peck against his mouth and he would be left wandering in a daze wondering how and _if_ he deserved such luck, and such compassion. More often than not, he would wind his way to the edge of the irrigation channel that ran along the ring dividing the colonial industrial area from the rows of hydroponic sheds that housed L2’s agricultural base. Howard had set up an ancient and aggressively tacky trailer in a small patch of artificial grass, ringed with plastic flamingos and lawn chairs arranged around a cooler and repurposed AstroTurf carpet. Duo would find him stretched out, his rangy, pale old-man legs propped on a milk crate and hands propped behind his head, lounging in the twilight as if he were on a tropical beach.

“Amigo!” he would greet, “It’s a great day for being alive!” and toss Duo a root beer from the cooler.

“You know on Earth and other colonies, they think this stuff is weird?” Howard would explain, for the hundredth time, “but the first colonists up here brought it with them all the way from the Great State of Michigan. And we’ve been drinking it ever since. It’s our history, my man.”

“I don’t see why you won’t give me a real beer,” Duo would whine, not really meaning it, and Howard would throw back his head and laugh.

“You make it to twenty-one, kid, and I will buy you a case. Keep it peaceful, make it a few more years, and I will buy you _all_ the cheap beer your heart could desire.”

“Whatever, man, you’ll be dead by then from _extreme old age,_ ” Duo would quip back, and Howard would laugh even harder, until his weathered Birkenstocks fell off and his ragged lawn chair would threaten to finally collapse. 

When Duo would make his way back through the dark streets and up the steps to his small studio, he would think about that deceptive laziness, the sense of Zen that Howard had managed. Would it be so bad, he thought, to retire to Hawaiian shirts and a tacky trailer? If Mike Howard, mobile suit engineer, anarchist, activist, rebel, and survivor, could enjoy a root beer on a floating piece of metal in the middle of space, then, hell, maybe there was some wisdom in sunglasses and sandals. 

His dingy but dirt-cheap apartment was a mess. He knew it, but there was a system in the chaos, and order to the piles of electronics, the bags of trash, the bags of definitely-not-trash, and the box of maybe-I-can-fix-this-ups. He had found a mattress at a charity shop, and it was a little lumpy, but he always slept well on it, and Howard had helped him lug an extremely hideous but deceptively comfortable orange floral sofa into the center of the room. He had cleared out a spot for a milk crate and a vid-screen, so he could look effortlessly relaxed and put together when he got the occasional call, and he even thought, privately, that it would be the perfect place to watch movies with Hilde, if, maybe, she would want to. 

She did want to, as it turned out, and the apartment acquired the warm scent of slightly burned popcorn. With Hilde as an occasional guest he stocked the fridge with soda and oven french fries, and became much more careful about taking out the trash. Hilde knew he was slob, obviously, he couldn’t change that, but he didn’t have to be _gross_. 

It hadn’t been long enough to relax, to really relax, but he was starting to feel the threads of hope. He watched Relena’s pretty face on the news and would yell “Hey, I know her!” in a late-night diner just to savor the eye-rolls and blank glares of the other patrons. He shared root beers and laughs with Howard and soft, long, heavy kisses with Hilde and thought maybe, _maybe_ he could get used to all of this.

And then Heero arrived for a visit.

* * *

Visit was probably the wrong word for it. Heero arrived to _stay_ with him, just appearing at his door with a backpack, a shuttle ticket sticking out of one back pocket, and the bulge of a gun in his belt. While Duo was confident enough in himself to admit Heero was usually a total dish, he didn’t look all that great. There was a grey cast under his eyes and a set to his jaw that never relaxed. But what really worried Duo was the soap.

Duo would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a classy dude like Quatre, who probably had body wash that cost more than Duo’s rent, but when you had the amount of hair that Duo did, you knew you had to buy some shampoo and conditioner. He had scoured the least overwhelming department store near his apartment and found a mildly-scented brand that he could buy in bulk bottles, because it took a _lot_. He bought a razor and shaving cream when the short hairs above his lip started to become both noticeable but embarrassingly meager, and he only cut himself the first few times while shaving. Well, the first dozen times. He felt, all in all, that he was doing pretty well at this whole responsible civilian thing, especially considering the number of graves he was personally responsible for.

And then, fuck it all, Heero showed up with his single bar of soap. 

Heero had been showering in the single, tiny bathroom, and Duo really, _really_ needed a piss. After dancing around for a few moments, he thought, fuck it, it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen basically all of his closest friends naked and/or bleeding out at some point, and some misguided propriety about Heero’s dick wasn’t a good enough reason to piss in the sink. If you see someone reset their own femur, he reasoned, nudity should no longer be an issue.

“Hey, bud, I’m coming in to take a leak,” he yelled through the door, and when he heard a muffled grunt of confirmation, walked into the tiny bathroom and froze. Heero was standing with his back to him in the tiny shower, completely unfazed by his friend’s appearance, but it wasn’t the ropy scars or lines of unevenly tanned skin that stopped Duo in his tracks.

Heero was washing his hair.

Heero was washing his hair with a bar of goddamn soap.

Heero was washing his goddamn hair with a bar of goddamn generic white single-credit-store soap, like that was something that you just _did_ , like cleaning your body was like cleaning an object, something perfunctory and ultimately meaningless. Like it was just another machine, keep it clean, keep it functional, don’t get attached. 

Duo felt like crying. He finished relieving himself, went outside, strangely disconcerted, with his heart suddenly heavy and his ears ringing. No matter how bad things had been, no matter how close to death and dying he had been, and how little he had _cared_ , Duo had never thought of himself as an object. Heero, he thought, was Fucked Up Beyond All Reckoning, and if this was his closest peer, his best friend, what the fuck did that say about _him_?

* * *

He paid a little more attention then, to the way Heero held himself, the way he attacked the idea of civilian life as if it were a battle, not a refuge. There was always tension in the muscle in his neck, like he was straining against a bit. The single, battered, military surplus backpack, the two pairs of worn, too-long jeans, definitely handed down from Trowa. He was awake, typing on a work-pad when Duo went to bed, and Duo assumed that he slept, but in the morning when he rolled over and looked across the tiny apartment, Heero would be there, awake, working, the thin blankets that Duo had laid out for him folded over the back of the couch as though they had never been touched. Everything was put away as soon as it was used, methodical, paranoid; the painted veneer of normalcy for someone for whom normalcy had always been a vague concept, and one that had never truly been understood.

Heero silently helped him in the junkyard, mechanically ate whatever Duo or Hilde set in front of him, and took his morning shower with his sad, single bar of soap. Duo had looked around for a soap dish, a tin, that he might carry it in, but instead found only a soap-stained plastic bag. And that almost made his start crying again. Duo half-wondered if carrying all that tension in his shoulders and in his jaw would slowly tear Heero apart from the inside, his muscles tightening so hard that they would snap his own bones.

When he finally headed off down the road to the shuttle port, dingy backpack slung over his shoulder, Hilde came to wrap an arm around Duo’s waist as they watched him walk away. 

“Your friend,” Hilde said mildly, “is really weird.”

All Duo could do was shake his head, “Babe, you have _no_ idea.”

* * *

  
  


In the last clashes of the Barton Foundation’s failed coup and that entire horrible, frustrating, needless shitshow, what the _actual fuck_ Wufei, Duo realized two things. First, he had missed this, the thrill of fighting, the rush of adrenaline, the frenzied, manic energy. Second, he never ever wanted to do this again.

He was triaged quickly, placed in a waiting area while gurneys sped by and klaxons sounded. His ears were ringing, dirty hands shaking, and he kept standing, sitting, standing again. Across the room he could see Trowa, completely still, silent, and pale, his eyes locked in an unseeing, unresponsive thousand-yard stare. Cathy Bloom was beside him, adjusting the blanket around him, pressing a paper cup of coffee into his hands, and gently rubbing his back as she watched the chaos around them. In the clamor he could hear Sally Po’s calm, confident voice directing the unsteady, uncertain huddle of people and Duo wondered how on _Earth_ she could possibly still be standing. 

After Sally patted him down for injuries, despite his protests and insistence that shouldn’t _she_ be subject to the same indignities, she had a goddamn black-eye blossoming, _Jesus_ , he was finally discharged with a fresh tetanus shot and a hard, quick hug, free to go and check on everyone else. When his sneakers skidded to a stop in front of the door marked “YUY,” he found Relena already inside. She was doubled over at the side of Heero’s hospital bed, her hand in a white-knuckled grip around his limp one, and her face buried in the arm resting along the edge of the bed. 

Duo cleared his throat softly, and she looked up at him, startled. Her soft eyes were clouded with fatigue and ringed with dark circles. She had lost her pink jacket somewhere in the fracas and her cream silk shirt was crusted with dust, with a ragged tear just below the elbow and the bottoms of her sleeves were splashed with hardened blood. Her light makeup had drifted down to pool in bruise-like hollows under her lower lids and her face was somehow both deathly pale and blotchy at the same time. Duo couldn’t help thinking that she still looked like a fairy-tale princess. 

Duo tried for a cocky smile, and even thought he might have half pulled one off. 

“Hey, how’s the patient?”

“He’s…” she rasped, and then cleared her throat, “He’s resting. Medically-induced coma. They said the exhaustion was as bad as the injuries. He’s on fluids right now. They said he’ll be fine. They promised.”

Her voice cracked on the last word and her eyes threatened to overflow again.

“Hey,” Duo said, attempting levity, “Remember when this guy jumped out of a window and didn’t open his parachute? I don’t think he knows _how_ to die.”

“He was so cold.” Relena half-sobbed, “When they got to us, he was so cold.”

Duo was grateful for a hard-faced nurse and an unflappable but very grimy Sally Po who walked in at that moment. He wasn’t sure how to talk to princesses, much less crying ones. 

Sally looked from him to Relena, her blackening eyes wide, and immediately took charge.

“Duo! I’m glad you made it over here! Just in time too, I need help prying this girl out of her chair and off to get some rest.” She walked over to place a gentle hand on Relena’s shoulder.

“Sweetheart, you look worse than I do, and I was just in a fire fight. In the past 48 hours you’ve been drugged, forcibly transported, held hostage, nearly assassinated, and had a building fall on you. The doctors are going to need some bloodwork at least.”

Relena looked up at her pleadingly “Can’t they do it here? I’m not leaving him.”

Sally exchanged glances with the nurse, and then knelt down next to Relena’s chair. 

“Listen, he’s going to be out for a while, and when he wakes up he’s going to be freaking out until he knows you’re okay. And right now? You don’t look okay, sweetie. You need a shower and some sleep. And when he wakes up, he’ll need some things, okay? A toothbrush, some soap, some new clothes. He won’t want to be stuck in a hospital gown. So, Duo and I are going to stay here and keep watch, and you are going to go wash what appear to be chunks of concrete out of your hair. And you are going to sleep for a few hours and then go get him some pajamas and soap and toothpaste. I _promise_ I will message you if he so much as breathes in a different direction. Okay? You have been so strong, so I need you to take care of yourself, because we are all going to need you to _keep_ being strong, not just for Heero, but for all of us. Can you do that? We’re depending on you.”

Relena looked as if she might shatter but she pulled her lower lip into her mouth and nodded, then nodded again firmly. Sally gently extricated Relena’s stiff hand from Heero’s and propelled her towards the nurse, who took her by the shoulders.

“It’s going to be okay,” Duo managed as she gave him a pleading look, “We’ll be here. Swear to God.”

“Take care of him while I’m gone,” she whispered, and Duo could only answer back, “Of course, of course.”

* * *

Relena, good to her word, disappeared for four hours, gave a beautifully evocative and stirring speech on reconciliation and revival in an immaculate white suit that probably still had price tags, and then disappeared for another two. When she finally arrived back at the hospital, Heero hadn’t stirred at all. She was breathless, still a little drawn, but with much better color, much cleaner. Her sparkling new suit was gone, replaced with an enormous jumper and jeans, sensible but dowdy loafers on her feet, and a pasteboard box in her hands full of supplies.

Duo had a strange image of her, in oversized jumper and jeans, wandering the faceless aisles of a 24-hour retail store, carefully examining each possible option, thinking, deliberately and obsessively, on which smell, which packaging, which _price_ would be the least offensive. She had succeeded admirably, each small parcel was plain, balanced between simplicity and cost, all of them nice but not expensive, as if she had calculated the exact center of the over-scented, bottom shelf brands and the gaudy higher end brands. The contents were basic but comprehensive. Soft, knit pajama shirt and trousers in dark green, size S, a basic package of underthings, socks, and a warm looking grey jumper. Carefully placed next to them were black and white bottles with clear labels running along the side in bold san serif font declaring SHAMPOO and BODY WASH. The logo was plain too, not gaudy like some of the brands that regularly populated the shelves, just a simple, clean circle with a leaf across it. Duo had once bought soap called “HogWash” simply because the logo, a cheerful pig scrubbing himself in the bath, had cracked him up. He supposed that Heero would neither get, nor appreciate, the joke. 

Relena put the box down on the room's small table and turned to face him. He was sitting gracelessly in a chair on one side of the bed and she smiled at him, quiet and thankful, as she took the other side.

Now all there was to do was wait for Heero to wake up.

* * *

The next day found Dup lying in the hospital waiting room, sprawled over a couch, pretending to nap and trying very hard not to listen in to the conversations scattered around the room. Noin and that Zechs guy were having a heated discussion by the automatic coffee-bot, and Duo could hear her hissing “... _one whole year_ …” before she was interrupted by Cathy, who looked at them, eyes wide, expeditiously refilled her mug of coffee, and, on her rapid way back out the door, caught Duo’s gaze. She cocked her head in a vague but entirely too fluent gesture of _I don’t even want to know,_ and Duo had to stifle his laugh with an entirely too dramatic yawn. 

Finally, after _ages_ , Sally stuck her head into the breakroom, looking like a raccoon, both eyes having blackened overnight, her nose bandaged across the bridge. She had on a clean uniform, however, and her hair was back in tidy pigtails, her grin not diminished by the bruises and scrapes.

“He woke up a few minutes ago,” she smiled, and laughed as he bounced up off the waiting room couch and dashed past her towards the far hallway. He made it to the doorway, stopping short, his excitement dissolving into flushed embarrassment, as he backed around the corner and looked quietly in.

Relena was sitting on the bed opposite the door, leaning forward at a sharp angle that met Heero’s body as he sat up in the bed, wires and tubes hanging like lax puppet strings from his nose, his arms, his temples. They both had their eyes closed, both with hands clasped hard around each other's faces, pressing _hard,_ forehead to forehead. Heero’s bruised skin was clearly visible where his body arched away from the ties of the hospital gown at his back, his whole body a sharp line angling towards Relena, hers reaching out towards his, vectors in space, colliding. Duo felt as though they were pushing, melting, trying to dissolve into one another's souls, as if they were trying to crack open their skulls and pour into one another. He could see the “V” of Heero’s hand cupping Relena’s ear, her hair pulled tightly back, and her fingers in his hair looked tense and desperate enough to draw blood from her nails. They were breathing raggedly into that small shared space between their faces, and there were silent tears running down her cheeks, heavy trails falling onto the hospital bed. They didn’t move, didn’t speak, just sat there, breathing and bleeding into one another.

Duo recoiled into the shadows, stumbling back down the hall. He would rather have seen them making out; the moment had been too intimate, too precious. He stared at the scuffed tops of his shoes and felt vaguely sick, tight in his chest, ashamed. He felt as though he had inadvertently spied on a prayer.

* * *

By the next time Heero visited, Duo had moved into a bigger apartment, with space for a separate bedroom and an actual view out the window. He had upgraded his bed and gotten actual furniture, not just relying on milk crates, but he had kept the couch in some strange sense of loyalty to the ugly, comfortable thing. Heero still had the single backpack, the gun tucked into his belt, but he looked better than he had the last time, and certainly better than he had in the hospital. The circles under his eyes were gone, and the grey cast had left his face, replaced by a warm tan and constellations of freckles. He looked alert too, but not paranoid, as he took in Duo’s new apartment.

“Thank you for the hospitality,” he said, finally, leaning his backpack up against the orange couch.

“Hey, man,” Duo replied, smiling, fucking _happy_ to see him there, “anytime.”

* * *

Heero’s toiletry bag, a whole bag, however small, was left in the bathroom, and, with the door locked, Dup couldn’t help but snoop. The bag was plain and Spartan but somehow, the desperate sadness of the single bar of soap was gone. There were two small bottles, one of shampoo and one of body wash. A sensible-looking razor, and a small tin with shaving soap. Dup couldn’t help but notice that they were the same brands as the ones Relena had brought him in the hospital, hers replaced or supplemented with travel sizes of the same. A toothbrush, toothpaste tabs, and a spool of floss. A small pair of scissors. Everything tidy and in its place, and plain, practical. But they were things that a _person_ had, a person who cared enough about themselves to take care of the necessities of cleaning and grooming, someone who cared who they were. 

And there, in the bottom of the bag was a zippered waterproof pocket, slightly lumpy and partially hidden. Duo glanced behind him at the still-locked bathroom door and unzipped the pocket like disarming a bomb. There, tucked carefully into the inner lining of the bag, protected from the elements, Duo saw the corner of a piece of paper, and carefully pulled it halfway out with his fingernails.

Laminated with packing tape but worn from wear was a clipping from the print news, a picture of Relena in her pink suit, looking determined and fierce, delivering an impassioned address, the wind sweeping her hair as if it, too, had been caught up in the drama of the moment. The edges of the picture were worn and slightly dirty, as if it had been pulled out again and again, a talisman, a reminder, a promise.

Duo carefully replaced the picture and found himself grinning. Even if he couldn’t yet bring himself to ask his girlfriend for a picture to keep in his wallet, Heero was going to be okay.

They all were.

Someday.

* * *

* * *

_Brother, I am fire_

_Surging under the ocean floor._

_I shall never meet you, brother—_

_Not for years, anyhow;_

_Maybe thousands of years, brother._

_Then I will warm you,_

_Hold you close, wrap you in circles,_

_Use you and change you—_

_Maybe thousands of years, brother._

**-Carl Sandburg**


End file.
